June 2008

Research in Motion Ltd., makers of the Blackberry devices, had a rough week last week. It lost over 15% of its share value in a week. Why? It announced that its revenue growth was up 107% from the same period last year and it was profitable (84 cents per share for the three months ending [...]

The next big employer-employee dispute is not life/work balance but whether one should be paid to check their Blackberry after hours. There have already been several union grievances filed over this issue with the union contending that employees should be paid over-time for looking at their Blackberrys. Most of the grievances have lost because checking [...]

On the heels of the Royal Bank of Scotland warning of an impeding stock market crash, Warren Buffet commented yesterday that the U.S. economy is in a recession and getting worse. The economy is under at least three distinct pressures: collapse of the real estate market in the United States, the financial industry unwilling to [...]

My regular columnist, Mom2KG, made a request that I blog about how to deal with collection agencies (great topic) but I thought I would take one step back before addressing that issue next week and explore the question of what options a person has if they owe someone money and can’t pay it. By way [...]

I am a begrudging buyer of bonds and fixed income. Yes, I need them for asset allocation and diversification but I really dislike buying them for several reasons: (i) their payments are tax inefficient; (ii) their face value is affected, relatively speaking, to macro-economic factors more than stock; (iii) with a long investing horizon (20+ [...]

As I predicted last week, BCE, history’s largest private-equity privatization to date, received judicial approval to proceed with the privatization as planned on Friday afternoon; the Supreme Court of Canada over-turned a Quebec Court of Appeal ruling that the privatization could not proceed based on belief the ruling was not fair to the bond-holders (in [...]

I have deliberately made this a light posting week because of personal commitments (its summer, I get to have a life!) and to give myself some perspective on this blog. The blog is 14 months old now with over 260 entries and, over that time, it has evolved quite a bit. I now have a [...]

My regular columnist, Mom2KG, checks in on the comings and goings of her family’s personal finance and why you should always stay sober at places designed to take your money. Viva Las Vegas! Vacations are lovely things. But a girls’ weekend in Vegas – that’s a whole different kinda lovely. I would like to share [...]

Everything old is new again in the financial industry. With dividend yields on some stocks getting dangerous high (see Bank of America), sometimes a predictor of a dividend cut, and income trusts in Canada converting back to corporations in anticipation of the income trust tax, people are beginning to take a look at preference shares [...]

Last week, I addressed tangentially the BCE situation; for those who don’t know, BCE is the largest private equity privatization in history but there are two big roadblocks to privatization; (i) the Quebec Court of Appeal found the privatization (which is really a take-over by private equity and Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan) did not fairly [...]

Loss Protection

Thinking of expanding your business facility?
A performance bond protects you against contractor non-performance and gives you the peace of mind you need to see that expansion project through to fruition.